Hill Valley, California, 1985. Destined to follow in his wimpy dad's footsteps, average high school teenager Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is about to make history. And when his crackpot scientist friend Emmett "Doc" Brown (Christopher Lloyd) fashions a time machine out of a 1982 DeLorean DMC-12, Marty inadvertently jumps back 30 years to do the unthinkable. But things were different in 1955. Like a fish out of water, Marty gives his all to keep the time/space continuum intact; however, unforeseen romantic complications stand in the way of a safe return.
The score is built around several recurring ideas and motifs, but the score doesn’t actually get going until quite some way into the film. The main theme, taken in its entirety, is now very familiar, but when you listen to the score more closely, it becomes apparent that Silvestri was very clever in how he adapted the theme and used it throughout the score in fragments. There is both an A-phrase and a B-phrase part of the theme - one ascending, one descending - but also smaller three-and-four note allusions to both phrases, which Silvestri uses regularly to invoke magic, mystery, and a sense of mischief. The fact that a theme with this sort of extended melodic line can be broken down and used as sub-motifs of itself is testament to Silvestri’s great skill and intellectual application in this regard.
15 сен 2024
